[mrep]

Because you can choose a different phone OS, and you can choose a different browser on that OS. Also, both of those things are open source so you can fork them if you want.

How do you think it violates antitrust laws? Do you propose that all companies should be required to make all of their features available on all possible variational usage of their service?

[fyfy18]

This is no different than when Microsoft got hit by fines and was forced to include the browser chooser. You were still free to install Firefox or Linux, but the issue was that the defaults on new PCs used Microsoft products, and most people use the default options.

[srtjstjsj]

Of course it's different.

For 1, what was the market landscape for smartphone websearch in 2009?

For 2, The Microsoft decision was the result of complex litigation relating to the specifics of microsoft's position in the market, defining what the "market" even was, and the nature of newly invented web browsers, and the conclusions reached in that trial were quickly disregarded by the prosecutor/government within a few years. There's no bright-line law here.

[realusername]

Android has 75% market share, it's not like you can avoid it, they have practically a monopoly. As much as people like Apple here, it's nowhere near the same market share as Android.

Also you should put quotes around open-source, AOSP does not run on any real device due to a lot of android parts being private + private drivers. It took me one month to run a custom kernel on my Samsung to get the basic hardware working, it's as far as open source as you can get. Android is a "look but don't touch" kind of open-source.

[peterwwillis]

Back in the day Microsoft actually used the existence of Linux as a legal argument that they could not possibly be a monopoly. The judge didn't buy it.

[Fnoord]

It was mostly Apple and MacOS which were used as the excuse, not Linux. And Microsoft kept both on life support by supporting software for them (e.g. Internet Explorer pre Safari).

[Fnoord]

You can run Android such as LineageOS without Opengapps perfectly fine. You can also use microG (with or without LineageOS), though that may be against Google ToS.

[IshKebab]

Apple does have a significant market share in some advanced economies though. Over 30% in the UK, Japan, Australia & USA.

[peterwwillis]

IANAL, but the product tying interpretation of US antitrust law specifies that making one product or service a mandatory addition to the purchase of a different product or service can be considered an anticompetitive practice.

The "feature" in question in their application was "searching the web". Imagine if they shipped a default e-mail client that only allowed you to use Gmail, and you had to install a separate client to use e-mail with any other e-mail provider. How many people are going to just use Gmail rather than go find some other app and provider? That's an unfair advantage due to product tying.

Microsoft bundled IE into Windows 98 in a way that you could not remove. Microsoft argued that, hey, it's just a standard part of an operating system, and you can get something else, what's the big deal. The government didn't buy it. They settled before the government could reach a final ruling about whether this was anticompetitive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)#Microsoft_pro...

[srtjstjsj]

> Imagine if they shipped a default e-mail client that only allowed you to use Gmail, and you had to install a separate client to use e-mail with any other e-mail provider.

That's how Google Android works now. There originally was a generic email app, but Google quickly replaced it with Gmail early on.

[slavik81]

The app may be called gmail, but it works just as well with my hotmail account as it does with my gmail account.

[euyyn]

The government didn't buy it because Microsoft threatened OEMs that dared preinstall Netscape in the Windows computers they wanted to sell, among other things.

[exikyut]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17489605